Adapting to popular sounds or genres is never easy for an artist with a decade of work in piano rock. Contemporary artists who find themselves at the top of the charts now may find that, in a year or two, they come nowhere close. What happens next is either a perseverance with their aged sound or a brutal attempt at creating contrast with their previous works. Billy Joel opts for the latter on Glass Houses, a soft relaunch of him as a leather jacket-wearing rocker who tries to move on from some of his best works, which were released just a few years before this. No artist can ever safely run from piano rock, though. Just a few seconds in, and Joel makes it clear Glass Houses will be an increasingly obvious, on-the-nose album.
It is one thing to note the adage of throwing stones in glass houses, and another level entirely to open the album with the shattering glass. Where this may sound like a man on a mission, it is more a case, time and again on Glass Houses, of Joel nudging us in the shoulder with a big grin, asking if we get it. Relatively tame and reductive instrumentals open Glass Houses, with You May Be Right a loose adaptation of the rocking rebellion which was popular before the invention of colour television. Catchy late-1970s pop works can be heard as Joel prepares his listeners for a step into the synth-styled 1980s. Sometimes a Fantasy is the sort of shlock which is reserved for movie soundtracks needing to push a character to their optimistic limit. An earworm song which precedes another in a long line of miserably tame, hand-clapping cowardice from Joel.
Soppy piano rock suggestions and a slight flourish of poppier tones on Don’t Ask Me Why are routine, fine efforts. Such a slump in form can be heard as Glass Houses groans on, with Joel portraying a pastiche of himself on It’s Still Rock and Roll To Me, attempting to convince as he lifts Bruce Springsteen-like saxophone intonations with less warmth. Joel once had an edge to his work, a sense of freedom and liberation in the everyday moments which made The Stranger such a welcome experience. It is the dud song from that album he chases here, though, with underwhelming love heard on Just the Way You Are informing every moment of Glass Houses. Even his harsher rock, those suggestions of punk tone or new wave influences in the well-mixed guitar work on All for Leyna, are underwhelming at best.
Forgettable stock on the A-Side is, at least, far stronger than the middle-of-the-road situation heard through the B-Side. From the Elvis Costello-chasing I Don’t Want to Be Alone to some soft adaptations of French as a language of love used as a prop up to the dull notions piano rock provides on C’etait toi (You Were the One). A rudderless adaptation of popular tones from the final years of the 1970s and little more than that. It is not that Joel does not fit them, there is just a lack of conviction in his performance. White noise on Sleeping With the Television On seems rather apt given the fence-sitting indifference of these songs and their tone. Love, life and all the great spoils of Joel in the past are still there, just backed by a lazy, popularity-chasing sound.
